Money Really Wasn't Easy to Earn

Thor stumbled back two steps in fright, his feet landing on the brick floor with a heavy thud.

The corpse strapped to the conveyor belt suddenly opened its eyes. Its head didn't move, but its eyeballs strained desperately to look to the left.

When it saw Thor and Kazi, its pupils abruptly widened and trembled slightly, as though it had seen something exciting.

"He's still alive?" Thor couldn't help asking Kazi.

"How could that be?" Kazi calmly walked forward and, right in front of Thor, lifted the black leather covering the new Apprentice.

Beneath it was a split-open chest, its ribs spread like wings. The chest cavity was empty.

Farther down, the legs had become strips of flesh mixed with dirt and stones.

They'd cut him up thoroughly.

Yet the Apprentice's eyeballs were still moving. They followed Kazi's movements and turned upward. His lips parted slightly, revealing a row of white teeth.

Thor felt his stomach churn.

In the days since arriving in this world, he'd seen plenty of bloody, horrific things in the Wizard Tower. That was what kept him from throwing up on the spot.

The test meant for him had begun.

He forced himself not to look away.

The nausea and dizziness remained, but Thor kept telling himself that it was only an immobile corpse. It wasn't going to suddenly get up and swallow half his face.

His fear eased a little.

"His brain died long ago. The soul left here isn't his own. And under normal circumstances, it isn't aggressive." Kazi covered the corpse with the black leather, then turned to Thor. "Are you afraid?"

Thor took a sharp breath of the foul air.

"Yes."

"Hmm?" Kazi raised an eyebrow.

"But I can do it."

"Hmph." Mentor Kazi gave a quiet snort. "This isn't a job you can do just because you want to. The corpse in front of you has already undergone two rounds of processing: neutralizing the danger and salvaging materials. These alienated corpses all have to be specially disposed of in the end. Otherwise, they'll get out and turn the Wizard Tower into a Ghost Domain. But before they're disposed of, we can keep some useful materials for experiments. Your job is to finish up and clean everything."

Kazi's dry hand slapped the black leather.

"Squelch!"

"You need to use your knowledge or your inspiration to find the parts here that have become magical through Alienation but aren't inhabited by ghosts. Cut them off and put them into the different boxes on the table, then close the lids for collection and preliminary containment. Put the rest in the large box below. After you leave tonight, someone outside will collect the boxes and replace them with new ones."

"I'll grade your work based on how many useful materials you find. You'll pass as long as you submit more than five pieces of material each month. If you find more than ten, you can earn an extra credit."

Kazi lifted his chin and gestured toward the still-moving corpse. "Now tell me: which parts do you think can be salvaged?"

Thor walked up to the conveyor belt, steeled himself, and pointed at the twitching eyeballs.

"Is this useful?"

"No." Kazi's expression didn't change.

So parts that looked alive weren't necessarily useful.

It might also be that they'd been tainted by some kind of strange Alienation and couldn't be reused, which made them useless to Wizards.

Money really wasn't easy to earn.

Did Wizards with the Dark Attribute deal with corpses and ghosts?

Thor took another deep breath.

He could tolerate the smell now. It was still foul, but it no longer made him want to vomit.

He yanked off the black leather and forced himself to look.

Perhaps becoming an Apprentice had awakened his Mental Power. Thor still felt sick, but he could now look at the heap on the conveyor belt without getting dizzy from fright.

To his naked eye, the ruined corpse looked no different from before. Thor couldn't tell what else might be useful as a Wizard's material.

In the corner of his eye, Thor saw Kazi's left hand tapping against his right arm. His patience was running out.

"Use my knowledge or my inspiration... But what I know so far can't help me tell the difference. So I'll have to rely on inspiration. What is inspiration? Intuition? Or Mental Power?"

Thor cautiously glanced toward his left shoulder. Unfortunately, his Hardcover Book only kept him alive; it didn't help him earn money or do his work. At the moment, it was as quiet as a lazy fish lying flat.

That left Thor with only one method to try.

Standing before the new Apprentice's corpse, he began visualizing the Human-Monster Walking Diagram.

Without a Crystal Ball to help him, it was difficult to enter a state of immersion. But what had happened in the Laboratory last night had let Thor enter a kind of half-meditative state without relying on one.

In that state, he could see elemental particles and things that were normally invisible to the naked eye.

Now, in Thor's vision, the still-moving eyeballs extended from the face like a snail's feelers, swaying up and down as they curiously examined the world.

A layer of hard black spines covered the corpse's lips.

The teeth beneath them glimmered faintly.

Thor stared at the intermittent glimmer, finding it familiar.

It looked like the notification that appeared when an item dropped in one of the games he used to play.

"Loot dropped! Loot dropped!"

"Have you found anything yet? I can give you a hint. There are at least two salvageable parts on this corpse. You only need to find one to pass."

Kazi's impatient voice interrupted Thor's meditation.

Thor had no time to tell whether the scene revealed by his Mental Power was reliable. He raised a hand and pointed at the corpse's mouth.

Kazi frowned. "You mean his mouth?"

"No. His teeth."

A brief flicker of surprise crossed Kazi's face.

He walked forward, picked up a thin black rod from the long table behind him, and pried open the corpse's lips.

"Ahem..." He looked back at Thor with a slightly awkward expression. "That's right. This is one."

He'd done it!

Thor held back his excitement and continued to examine the corpse's other parts in his half-immersed meditative state.

Then,

he saw two glimmering spots.

Thor pretended to be unsure and pointed out one of them.

Kazi nodded and asked whether he'd found anything else.

Thor carefully examined the corpse from head to toe once more, ignoring the last glimmering spot. Then he straightened up and told his mentor, "I haven't found anything else."

"Hmm, not bad." Kazi casually pointed to the spot Thor had noticed but left unmentioned. "There's another one here," he said flatly.

Next, Kazi verbally guided Thor in using the tools on the Experiment Table behind them to cut off and salvage the materials. Thor put them into three small boxes on the table, closed the lids, and secured the latches.

He wrapped the remaining parts of the corpse in the black leather and put them in the large box beneath the long table.

A Witchcraft Array had been carved into the box, giving it the power to seal ghosts.

Only a large bloodstain remained on the conveyor belt.

Kazi nodded and raised his chin, signaling Thor to pull the lever beside the Teleportation Platform again.

The machine whirred. The bloodstained conveyor belt moved beneath it, and another corpse emerged from behind the black leather fringe.

When Thor saw the head sticking out from beneath the leather, his eyes narrowed at once.

He knew this dead person too.

On the first day, when she'd delivered the textbooks, she had tried to seduce Thor. She'd also appeared in his nightmare that night.

The voluptuous maid!

Why was she dead too?

Had it been an accident or was someone responsible?

"Do you know her?" Kazi asked in his toneless voice, watching Thor's expression.

"Yes. She brought me my textbooks."

"In the Wizard Tower, death is common."

"What happens if people keep dying until there's no one left?"

"We recruit people from nearby towns. They're more than willing to send people here."

Their small talk over, Mentor Kazi pointed at the maid. "There's at least one usable part on her. If you can find it this time too, I'll give you this job."

Thor's spirits lifted. He set aside his grief for the maid and pulled off the black leather covering her.

The maid's body was naked, and the long wound across her chest showed that she'd been dissected too. But she was an ordinary person, and although she'd died from something supernatural, there weren't many abnormal traces left on her body.

Unlike the new Apprentice they'd just finished with, who had been reduced to a light heap by the time they put him in the large box beneath the table.